head to head · open source
VictoriaMetrics vs cayley
VictoriaMetrics has 17,731 GitHub stars, 1,743 forks, 800 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cayley has 15,064 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. VictoriaMetrics leads on adoption by 18% (17,731 vs 15,064 stars). VictoriaMetrics is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. VictoriaMetrics has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. VictoriaMetrics was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| VictoriaMetrics | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 15K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick VictoriaMetrics if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cayley if
- You want the cayley feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cayley fits your workflow better
About VictoriaMetrics
VictoriaMetrics is time series database for metrics and logs. It is monitoring solution and database, written in Go, licensed under Apache 2.0. Category is Infrastructure & Operations / Databases. GitHub metadata lists 17714 stars and 1738 forks. Homepage is victoriametrics.com. It lives in infrastructure and operations ecosystem. Topic list includes Prometheus, Grafana, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OTLP, Graphite, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, metrics, monitoring, observability.
read the full VictoriaMetrics overview →
About cayley
Cayley is an open source graph database written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It stores and queries Linked Data, the graph shaped data model standardized by the W3C for the Semantic Web, and its design takes direct inspiration from the graph database that sat behind Google's Knowledge Graph, formerly known as Freebase. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and has been maintained in public for roughly twelve years, accumulating about 15,000 stars and 1,238 forks, with 93 open issues at the time of writing. Its topics — cayley, go, graph, graph database, linked data — describe both the language …
read the full cayley overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is VictoriaMetrics or cayley more popular?
VictoriaMetrics has 17,731 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,064. VictoriaMetrics has the larger community by that measure.
Are VictoriaMetrics and cayley free?
Both are open source. VictoriaMetrics is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between VictoriaMetrics and cayley?
VictoriaMetrics is written in Go and cayley in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, VictoriaMetrics or cayley?
Choose VictoriaMetrics if you want the larger community (17,731 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.